Deeplinks Blog posts about No Downtime for Free Speech

When a statute is clear, judges are supposed to follow it or explain, in some detail, why they shouldn’t. That’s why we were disappointed by this week's ruling in Tuteur v. Crosley Corcoran. In the ruling, the judge suggests that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) does not require the sender of a takedown notice to affirm anything except its belief that the targeted material is being used without permission from the owner or its agent. Trouble is, the statute says something very different, i.e., that the sender must affirm that the material is not authorized by “the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”

Next week, one of the most respected security research conferences in the world, the USENIX Security Symposium, will be held in Washington D.C. Thanks to a gag order from a British court, however, it won't go quite as planned. The order forbids the authors of a paper describing fundamental flaws in car lock systems from discussing key aspects of the work, based on nothing more than speculation about a third party's alleged “misuse of confidential information.”

The United States Chamber of Commerce has come to its senses at last and withdrawn its lawsuit against political activists the Yes Men. In the lawsuit, the Chamber had claimed that a 2009 press conference—in which a Yes Man posing as a Chamber of Commerce spokesperson announced the Chamber was reversing its long held position and endorsing climate change legislation—infringed the Chamber's trademark rights. Before the press conference was even completed, a Chamber of Commerce representative rushed into the room and announced that the Chamber's position on climate change legislation had not in fact changed. The result: widespread media coverage of the event and the Chamber's humorless response. The Yes Men tell the story best.

Did the Chamber of Commerce finally get a sense of humor? Or did it just realize the lawsuit was doomed?

The following is a guest post from M.C.A. Hogarth—author, space marine enthusiast, and indie business advisor.

I'm M.C.A. Hogarth and I'd like to tell you how the EFF helped protect my work and the idea of a "space marine" from a shameless legal bully.

I wrote a web serial called Spots the Space Marine as an homage to Heinlein and the greats of science fiction. Crowdfunding allowed me to launch print and e-book editions that I made available on Amazon... until a trademark threat from Games Workshop over the term "space marine" caused Amazon to remove the ebook from its virtual shelves.